Major Spoilers Podcast Saturday 10/17

Pete Coogan here.

I’ve fallen a little off the blogging schedule I set of twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays). I’m not entirely sure about the blog medium, but I’m going to try to keep up. And I’ll get back to talking about next year’s conferences next week.

On Wednesday I recorded an episode for the Major Spoilers Podcast with host Stephen Schleicher. We talked a little about the conferences I’m organizing next year. A lot of the discussion was about the TV show Heroes because it’s the topic of my talk on Wednesday, October 28, at the University of Oregon as part of the Understanding Superheroes semester. The school has a conference next week and an ongoing art show. I’m being brought in with Douglas Wolk to talk about the essence of the superhero in my talk “Heroes Ain’t Superheroes.” I’ve concluded that Heroes is not a superhero genre show, but a science fiction superpeople/homo-superior show that draws on the superhero genre (especially for storylines). Then we talked about whether superheroes are modern mythology, a follow up to the show MSP #139 “Is the Man of Tomorrow the Myth of Today?” on that topic. I thought they had a very solid discussion, but that they left out some of the cultural constructions of myth, so I brought those into the discussion. It’s all part of working to be a public intellectual and to inform cultural conversation with some theory-based research.